Pablo Marcos

Pablo Marcos is a comic book artist, and is best known as one of his home country’s leading cartoonists and for his work on popular American comic characters such as Batman and Conan the Barbarian, particularly during the 1970’s.

His signature character was Marvel Comics’ the Zombie, for which Marcos drew all but one story in the black-and-white horror-comics magazine Tales of the Zombie (1973–75).American Comics.

Marcos moved to New Jersey in the U.S. in the 1970’s. Warren Publishing art director Billy Graham assigned him his first American-comics work, penciling and inking the six-page story “The Water World”, by writer Buddy Sounders, in Warren’s black-and-white horror-comics magazine Creepy #39 (May 1971). After another Creepy story and one in companion magazine Eerie that year, Marcos drew comics exclusively for rival Skywald Publications’ Nightmare and Psycho from May 1972 to May 1973 cover-dates. Skywald co-founder Sol Brodsky introduced Marcos to fellow Peruvian artist Boris Vallejo, who became a mentor of his.

When Brodsky, who had been Marvel Comics’ production manager, left Skywald to return to Marvel, he brought Marcos along as an artist and later on as his staff assistant for roughly two months. Marcos began drawing covers for Marvel UK titles featuring such characters and features as Captain Britain, “Planet of the Apes”, and Dracula. Marcos’ naturalistic, “illustrative” style, became a mainstay of Marvel’s black-and-white horror-comics magazines Dracula Lives, Monsters Unleashed, Tales of the Zombie, Vampire Tales and others, and the exposure afforded by industry leader Marvel made Marcos a popular artist of the 1970s.

His first color-comics work in the U.S. was the cover of Marvel’s Giant-Size Dracula #2 (Sept. 1974). Marcos’ color-comics interior-art debut came with publisher Martin Goodman’s short-lived Atlas/Seaboard Comics, illustrating the sword-and-sorcery title Iron Jaw #3 (May 1975). He went on to draw the following issue, plus the Iron Jaw story in Barbarians #1 and the cover of The Brute #3 (both July 1975) before the company folded.

Next Marcos freelanced for DC Comics, drawing Man-Bat stories on Detective Comics, and working on one or two issues of several series, including Freedom Fighters, Kamandi, Kobra, Secret Society of Super-Villains, and Teen Titans before returning to Marvel to do art for issues of The Avengers, The Mighty Thor and other comics. In 1980, Marcos additionally freelanced for an Italian comic-book series, Tremila Dollari per Ebenezer Cross Western Story, for Lanciostory, Italy and Dragon for Mexican Publishing Ejea.By early 1980’s, Marcos was at work at what would become one of his signature characters, inking penciler John Buscema on Conan the Barbarian comic books, the black-and-white magazine The Savage Sword of Conan, and the newspaper comic strip. In September 1985, however, Marcos reduced his workload in order to attend to his severely ill wife, a patient at New York University Medical Center, who died on November 6, 1985, age 42. Unable to concentrate on penciling, Marcos solely inked for some time afterward. He married artist Myriam Giraldo on Dec. 10, 1988 in New Jersey.

The following year, Marcos created the character Suko the Eternal Samurai, a Japanese time-traveler, but the concept could not be sold. He then illustrated a long run of DC’s TV tie-in series Star Trek: The Next Generation through the early 1990’s, and again from 1993–1994, the year he and his wife moved to Mexico City, where they opened the comic-book store “Dynamic Comics”. Later on he drew and painted his own 14-page story “Om”, which was scripted by Ron Fortier from a Marcos plot, on Quantum Cat Entertainment’s Frank Frazetta Fantasy Illustrated #7 (July 1999).

In the 1990’s and 2000’s, the Pablo Marcos Studio illustrated many books in Waldman Publishing’s Great Illustrated Classics series of young-adult adaptations of novels such as Gulliver’s Travels, The Invisible Man, Jane Eyre, The Jungle Book, King Solomon’s Mines, A Little Princess, Dracula, Frankenstein, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Moby Dick, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, The Last of the Mohicans and The Three Musketeers. His studio similarly illustrated Baronet’s “Heroes of America: Illustrated Lives” series, including Clara Barton and the American Red Cross and Babe Ruth. Also in 1999, he drew for Soccer Jr. Magazine, Heavy Metal Magazine with his own character Norka. In the same year, he began drawing for Crossgen Comics and Dynamite Entertainment in the series Red Sonja, Army of Darkness and Savage Tales up to present. He also draws for Sports Illustrated, Kids magazine in the series”Legends”. In 2010 Pablo illustrated the first issue “Spider” for Moonstone, and in 2011 he drew the new series MACHU PICCHU, the Eternal Energy. In November 2011 and early 2012, he drew the series KING SOLOMON’S Mines —a 48-page hand painting for Sequential Comics Pulps/Dark Horse— and started to produce his own creation —RAMSES, the Hawk.

In 2013 Pablo signed a 5-year contract with Edgar Rice Burroughs Inc. to do one page of TARZAN OF THE APES and THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT. Both of them are digital series (See: http://www.edgarriceburroughs.com/comics/).

At the end of 2014, he did the cover and 10 interior pages of Red Sonja issue #100 for Dynamite Entertainment.